SEEfest 2018

In 2018 SEEfest looks to Trieste, a picturesque port city in northeast Italy that maintains a distinctly Mitteleuropean flavour to this day. As a crossroads between Austrian, Italian, Slavic and Jewish cultures on the peripheries of Habsburg Austria, modern Italy, and the Balkan Peninsula, Trieste has been defined by its proximity to borders erased and redrawn with unusual frequency.

Contested and contemplated by poets, scholars, novelists, and filmmakers, it has been depicted as a microcosm of plurinational civility, an uncanny non-place or as a site of mystery and political intrigue, in works of narrative fiction and non-fiction that blur the line between myth and reality.

SEEfest invites you to reflect on this city as a metaphor for the ironies, uncertainties and possibilities that characterize not only the South East European experience, but many facets of our global age; shifting and disappearing borders, fervent nationalisms, placeless places and the multiplicity of identities that are confluent, and sometimes conflicting, in us all.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I and the 2018 festival will be a journey to a bygone era, painting another layered and multi-national portrait of South East Europe for Angeleno audiences.